Pope Benedict XVI will straddle second base in Yankee Stadium in New York but stand over center field at Nationals Park in Washington. There are 100,000 ponchos on hand in the Bronx in case of rain, while three Polish nuns have dusted off a gold and silver garment, hand-woven more than a century ago, for the pontiff to wear at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the capital.

Mass tickets, many of them allocated to parishes based on average Sunday attendance and distributed by lottery, have been designated with each individual’s name, address and date of birth; a government-issued photo identification is required to prevent trade or sale.

With all its spiritual, political and cultural significance, the pope’s six-day visit to Washington and New York next week is also a daunting logistical operation involving everything from candles and catering to cell phones and ciboria, the metal goblets that hold communion wafers.

Coordinating these and other details are high-ranking clergy, Hollywood producers and veterans of political advance teams, who will communicate in New York via two-way radios that double as cell phones and are equipped with global positioning satellite devices.

Among the profound – and mundane – questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

“I just want to make sure it’s done reverently and safely,” the Rev. Msgr. Wallace A. Harris, the event coordinator for the Yankee Stadium Mass next Sunday afternoon.

For starters, the priests – who are coming from as far away as Australia and Alaska – are assigned based on dates of birth, with the youngest (and most able-bodied) assigned to the upper deck, where stairwells are narrow and steep, and the winds are strongest.

From the moment the pope lands at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Tuesday afternoon to his departure on Sunday evening from Kennedy International Airport in Queens, every movement will have been the subject of months of planning by two archdioceses, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, numerous law-enforcement agencies, the White House, the State Department and the United Nations.

He will be accompanied on this trip by an entourage of about 30 Vatican officials and 70 journalists. The Archdiocese of Washington estimates that the pope’s three-day visit to the capital will cost at least $3 million, financed by wealthy Catholic donors; the Archdiocese of New York would not provide a price tag but said that it, too, would rely on contributions from parishioners.

Church officials in the two cities have issued nearly 150,000 tickets to see Benedict at his public events, which also will be televised live. Attendees will also get to hear the tenor Placido Domingo (before the Mass at Nationals Park Thursday morning) or Harry Connick Jr. and Kelly Clarkson (at Yankee Stadium).

Pope Benedict, who was elected in 2005, is the third pope to visit the United States; Paul VI came to New York in 1965 and John Paul II was in the United States seven times, including New York and Washington in 1979 and New York, again, in 1995 (two of these visits amounted to refueling stops in Alaska in 1981 and 1984.)